My first heartbreak was extreme. I went to Australia for 10 months when I was at school and told the girl I was madly in love with not to come out to see me - and of course, when I came back, she met me at the airport to tell me she'd met someone els...
I would love to live stream them all, so if you're in New York and you come along, you can watch Tropfest N.Y., and six weeks later you are watching Tropfest Arabia or Tropfest Australia live stream, and so they are all connected.
As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.
The English probably do that wordplay kind of humour and whimsy better than anyone, and I've always felt that my writing goes more to that than what I did when I came to Australia.
The Labour Party of today has fits of horrors of the very thought of somebody like me might saying that they bought in white Australia. But I believe they did.
Australia is properly speaking an island, but it is so much larger than every other island on the face of the globe, that it is classed as a continent in order to convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude.
For me... you know, the most I've paid for a haircut was in Australia. Usually I go to a black barber or a Latino barber. I can't just go into Supercuts.
It's odd, that's why I don't like telling people I played field hockey. It's real big in Australia for guys. But I say I played in America, and everybody goes, 'Oh, you girl!'
I help out at Tall Trees, which my aunt set up on the Central Coast. It's where intellectually impaired young people can paint. Their artwork's sent to hospitals all over Australia to brighten up their rooms.
We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places.
Australia turns out to be a sensational place, albeit one of the most comfortably racist places I've ever been in. They've really settled into their intolerance like an old resentful slipper.
I hope the next time you get a double-decker strawberry ice-cream cone the ice cream part falls off the cone and lands in Australia.
The arrival of thousands of Muslim infiltrators to Israeli territory is a clear threat to the state's Jewish identity. The refugees' place is not among us, and the initiative to transfer them to Australia is the right and just solution.
I remember my brother Nash had just directed me in 'The Square,' and I was sitting in Australia going: 'No one's called me about working for ages. I don't know if I'm ever going to get another job.'
Back in Australia, I did foster care for sick cats for years, and I was always most successful with the animals when I was given two - a brother and sister.
What is likely to vanish - or be transformed beyond recognition - are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources.
The floods and fires and storms and droughts that Australia has suffered in the last few years have left no doubt in many Australians' minds about just how much is a stake in a super-heated world.
I've done my time in being broke in Indonesia. Eating Goat soup. Australia's a developed country, you've got a lot of taxes, rents are high and its quite difficult to survive as an artist especially when you are just coming up.
It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.
I'm very much half-American - my mom is American. I grew up in Australia until I was 16, then I finished high school over here because I got into this performing arts high school.
Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined.
